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Though he failed miserably at prospecting, Carleton Watkins struck gold when he took up photography.

After abandoning a fruitless career as a gold prospector, Carleton Watkins began his photography career in the 1850s as somewhat of a poseur. Following the sudden departure of another photographer, the owner of a photo studio frantically hired Watkins, who had no training in the nascent medium—invented only 20 years previously—to quickly fill the newly vacant job until a more experienced photographer could be found. Though the owner was only looking for an amiable placeholder, Watkins swiftly took to photography and only a few years later, the gold prospector-cum-store clerk had established himself as one of the preeminent photographers of the untrammeled Western frontier.

See the Cantor's Carleton Watkins Flickr albumfeaturing images from the exhibit.

Regarded as a master of landscapes, Watkins’ work made the circuit of global expositions, garnering prizes and accolades along the way. Pristine river valleys, stark plains, ocean vistas, and snapshots of the boomtowns dotting the West Coast were all captured by his lens. Best known, however, is Watkins’ study of Yosemite Valley, a collection of photographs that influenced Congress and President Lincoln to sign into law a conservation act that would stave off development and preserve the land’s natural beauty.

A literary critic inspires a composer to create a musical piece that meditates on time and its suspension.

It’s not a common occurrence that literary criticism inspires musical compositions—but Michael W. Clune’s 2013 book, Writing Against Time recently garnered that singular honor. Clune’s book is concerned with how illustrious writers as diverse as Keats, Orwell, and Roberto Bolaño, create the sensation of stopped time in their works. The book grabbed Christopher Trapani’s attention, and on May 1st, the New-York based composer will debut a musical piece which, like the writers in Clune’s study, evokes a prolonged, unraveling present—stopped time.

Based on Clune’s book, Trapani’s piece shares the same name and employs repetition and suspension to communicate in music precisely that which preoccupies Clune in the written word: how to sustain a single moment.

Time seems to slow when we perceive something for the first time. The moment of perception swells; the 'fraction of time' expands... In such moments we get a glimpse of the splendor of eternal life, of unfading color, unerased sensation. But these dilations don't last. What if they could?From Writing Against Time

Clune is in good company as far as Trapani’s musical adaptations go; previous pieces by the composer have been inspired by the works of Italo Calvino and Thomas Pynchon. In advance of the premiere performance next Thursday in Brooklyn, Clune will join Trapani in a pre-concert talk to discuss their collaboration and the concept of time as it applies to life and art.

Curiosity piqued by this collaboration, we tapped Michael Clune for a pre-pre-concert talk to ask him a few questions about his book and the music it has inspired.

Q:

What is it about time, and particularly its suspension, that fascinates you?

A:

I became interested in the suspension of time as a result of my experiences with heroin addiction. Reflecting on those experiences after being clean for some years, I came to believe that the key to addiction is not the way the drug makes you feel when you take it, but the way the drug appears when you see it. This partly explains why people quit drugs so many times and yet return again and again. The addictive object has a very particular quality for the addict. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, a vial of heroin will always radiate with the intensity and freshness of an object seen for the first time. If habit dulls perception, the addictive object seems immune to habit. It never ‘gets old.’ In a strange way, the problem of addiction is also an artistic problem. In my literary writing, I want to create an image that will also retain its intensity over time. I began to explore how writers, philosophers, and artists had imagined habit-resistant images, and the result of my investigation is “Writing Against Time.”

Q:

Did you know Christopher Trapani beforehand? How did the two of you meet?

A:

I didn’t know Christopher beforehand. He sent me an email saying he’d read the book, and had decided to take up the challenge of creating a time-resistant piece of music. One of the chapters of my book is called “Imaginary Music,” and we traded some emails talking about the design problems involved in realizing ideal music. I don’t know much about music theory or composition, and have already learned a great deal from Christopher. I’m really looking forward to hearing what he comes up with.

Q:

What was your reaction when you first received word that your book had inspired a composer?

A:

I was surprised, in a good way. Most of the people who’ve contacted me regarding the book are scholars, writers, scientists or philosophers. I was grateful that a composer—especially one as accomplished as Christopher—felt inspired by my book. It’s given me an opportunity to become more familiar with contemporary music, and to think more about the relation between literature and other arts.

Think you know Shakespeare? Think you know what famous philosophers would say about Shakespeare?

Centuries after Shakespeare first put quill to paper, his plays continue to provoke philosophical questions that run the gamut from sexual ethics to narrative form. In 2009 Comp Lit professor, Paul Kottman, pulled together a series of philosophical reflections on Shakespeare's plays from such preeminent and diverse thinkers as Marx, Derrida, and Hegel. These essays, gathered in Kottman's book, Philosophers On Shakespeare, show the staggering range of inquiry that the Bard's corpus presents readers. In honor of his 450th birthday, we've cobbled together a quiz based on Kottman's book to test your knowledge of both Shakespeare and some prominent philosophical personalities.

Philosophers On Shakespeare: A Quiz

Which philosopher noted that Shakespeare “excellently depicts the real nature of money”?

Karl Marx

Jacques Derrida

Walter Benjamin

Which philosopher argues that, in the tragedy of Hamlet, “existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or in an immortal afterlife"?

Before finding his own roots in A Family of No Prominence, Professor Eugene Park helped Margaret Cho uncover her ancestry on the PBS show, Finding Your Roots.

American-born and San Francisco-bred, actress and comedian Margaret Cho knew next to nothing about her Korean ancestors. When she appeared on Henry Louis Gates' PBS show, Finding Your Roots, she discovered a trove of family history, uncovering not only recent events—including those that precipitated her grandfather’s immigration to the United States—but she also unearthed staggeringly long-distant family genealogies. At the outset of her journey, Cho would have been hard-pressed to describe what prompted her family to leave Korea just two generations ago, and by its conclusion she was able trace her lineage back hundreds of years, back to her family’s clan leader, who lived in the 1200s.

What made this feat of genealogical discovery possible, as Professor Eugene Park explains in the episode, is the time-honored Korean practice of family record keeping. Meticulously documented family lineages, called chokpos (also written as jokbo), detail clan genealogies, beginning with the “founding father” of the clan, a progenitor, from whom stem a centuries-long litany of successive generations, all traced through the male line.

This book gives us a remarkable account of a nonelite family spanning the early modern and modern eras over three centuries.

Today, Park notes that most South Koreans have a pronounced sense of their ancestral status, and particularly its proximity to royalty and aristocracy, over and above their understanding of more recent family history. “In fact, most do not know their immediate ancestors’ roles, if any, during such nationally celebrated historical events as the March First Movement of 1919, when millions of Koreans protested Japanese colonial rule,” Park writes. Indeed, Margaret Cho was surprised to discover that her own grandfather was all but exiled during this period, on account of his association with the deeply-resented Japanese colonizers.

So how did Korean families, like Cho's and many others, come to lose this sense of collective memory? This is precisely the question which Park engages in his book, A Family of No Prominence. In it, Park traces the lineage of one Korean family—his own—to develop a deeper understanding of how political and economic forces of the past century have shaped Korean values and notions of identity.

From the Prologue:

By examining . . . the modern era in connection with master narratives on ancestry, we can begin to understand how old status anxieties under the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), the impact of Western institutions and ideas, Japanese colonial rule, and varied Korean responses to all these things have contributed to the construction of a usable past while obscuring diverse human experiences. The descent group narratives that crystallized in early modern Korea have framed popular discussions of ancestry in a way that allows little room for real family stories.You can read Park's Prologue in full here.

Northwestern football players are pushing for the right to unionize; could salaried college sports be next?

A Q&A with RODNEY FORT

Two weeks ago the National Labor Relations Board made waves when Judge Peter Sung Ohr ruled that Northwestern football players have the right to unionize. Judge Ohr characterized the relationship between student athletes and their universities as primarily an economic one owing to the amount of control coaches exert over athletes, and the contingent nature of athletic scholarships—students receive aid if, and only if, they lend their athletic talent to the school’s sports teams. Though the Northwestern football players aren’t pushing for any radical changes to the compensation system, economists and sports writers have noted more generally that the creation of student athlete labor unions would likely lead to more pressure for a pay-for-play system.

Pay-for-play—a source of longstanding debate in collegiate sports administration circles—would effectively make athletes salaried employees of their athletic departments. It’s a lightning rod issue, with both vociferous proponents and staunchly opposed status-quoers. Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, recently pitched his tent in the opponents’ camp, declaring that the move to characterize student athletes as employees “may well destroy” college sports. Scott’s chief allegation—that revenue-generating sports teams would hog profits and resources, leaving non-revenue sports to flounder—is one of a handful of myths surrounding the pay-for-play debate, according to authors Rodney Fort and Jason Winfree.

In their recent book, 15 Sports Myths and Why They’re Wrong, Fort and Winfree pull apart popular misconceptions surrounding both professional and collegiate sports. One of the many myths they debunk is that pay-for-play is unfeasible at the college level, and though both profess agnosticism on the issue of whether student athletes ought to be paid, they are significantly more committal when it comes to getting the facts straight on the arguments surrounding student athlete compensation.

We checked in with 15 Sports Myths co-author Rodney Fort to get his two cents on the NLRB decision and its potential implications for college athletics.

I know the Twitterverse and blogosphere are alive with crystal ball gazing—and many of the commentaries I’ve read have been thinly veiled attempts to impose what one would like to see rather than what might actually happen. I’m typically loath to do the Madame Olga routine myself, but that hasn’t stopped others from claiming that there’s a distinct possibility that the movement for pay-for-play may take hold.

Ohio legislators sure think so, since they are already making a bill that explicitly states college athletes are not employees in Ohio. But for now the decision is limited to NU football players. And their initial moves will prove instructive. Even the organizers state that they are not after full pay-for-play, but an improvement in working conditions—grants-in-aid to full cost of attendance, health care coverage, injury benefits even beyond college playing time, and the ability to more easily obtain emergency funding. Which brings to light the very first challenge that one would expect to occur under this limited scenario. NU will not bargain away its membership in the NCAA. If a football union attempts to bargain for anything that violates the NCAA amateur definition, NU will say no and point out that it would be irreparably damaged. Players, through their union leadership, will also recognize this is not in their best interests. So, I would expect the players to find everything outside the NCAA amateur definition and move to restructure compensation along those lines. And that is all that will happen for quite a few years. Interestingly, the NCAA has been slowly moving along those lines anyway so I wouldn’t expect any real push back in the early stages.

I’ll give the tried-and-true economist response: “It Depends.” Nobody has chosen any among the many ways that pay-for-play can be structured and walked through everything about that particular model to gain insight into the outcome. Will it be a free agent free-for-all? Will it be structured inside of a collective bargaining outcome way off in the future? Will it be imposed by a break away from the NCAA? Will it be free market oriented or command and control in small increments through the NCAA redefining what it means to be an “amateur”? In 15 Sports Myths, Winfree and I are careful to stay within the general notion of “restructuring compensation” so we can take on myths like, “Athletic Departments already lose money so pay-for-play (or Title IX) will just drive many departments to lower levels of play.” From our chosen level of generality, this type of claim is simply incorrect and misleading and, we argue, purposefully proliferated by those who benefit from the myth. I don’t think anybody can make a call on the sustainability of a particular pay-for-play mechanism until said mechanism is fully specified.

Mr. Scott’s public statements employ another myth we cover in 15 Sports Myths, namely, that football and men’s basketball are net revenue centers and the proceeds go to cover the rest of the sports that can’t pay their own way. The premise is untrue and so then must be the conclusion. Very few athletic departments even have a net positive result in the two men’s sports. So by and large, most other sports are run on a break-even basis based on their value to the university at large, mainly financed by institutional support from the university administration to athletics. And the threat that it would be women’s sports that would bear the brunt, counter to Title IX advances, is simply bluster. Again, these observations are at a very general level and hold true. But remember, nobody has actually put forth a concrete proposal for pay-for-play and analyzed it through the lens of university decision-making.

What philosophical compass guides the Roberts Court's take on political equality? Forthcoming author, Timothy Kuhner takes a stab at this question in his forthcoming book, Capitalism v. Democracy.

The recent ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission has left many observers gobsmacked and reeling. Doubling down on Citizens United, the decision does away with a decades-old law that capped individual’s total political contributions in a given election cycle and has been widely viewed as another benchmark in the Roberts Court’s use of capitalist ideology to interpret the Constitution.

Timothy Kuhner, in his forthcoming book, Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution, takes a look at the case law and conceptual shifts in the Supreme Court that paved the way for the McCutcheon ruling. Reviewing cases including Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, Davis and Bennett and several others, Kuhner traces the legal pathway that has gradually shaped democratic participation into a transactional market. Such thinking has led to the current court’s line of thinking, in which regulatory measures meant to ensure political equality are construed as unconstitutional restraints on first amendment expression. In a parody of these priorities, Kuhner cites John Rawls’ canonical work, A Theory of Justice, and imagines a tongue-in-cheek Roberts Court re-write of Rawls’ ideal scenario for equal political access in a democratic society:

Let us take well-known principles in the way of a familiar place, and measure the distance between these principles and those used by the Roberts Court. . . In his seminal work, John Rawls wrote:

The constitution must take steps to enhance the value of equal rights of participation for all members of society . . . Those similarly endowed and motivated should have roughly the same chance of attaining positions of political authority irrespective of their economic and social class . . . The liberties protected by the principle of participation lose much of their value whenever those who have greater private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate.

Austin and McConnell served Rawls’s principles, which are also familiar from our discussion of egalitarianism; however, in Citizens United, Davis, and Bennett [and now, McCutcheon], the Court effectively made these revisions:

The Constitution must take steps to safeguard the market-calibrated value of rights of participation for all members of society including corporations . . . Those similarly endowed with the strengths of wealth and wealthy supporters, and similarly motivated to exploit those strengths should have roughly the same chance of attaining positions of political authority and influencing the public debate . . . The liberties protected by the principle of participation lose much of their value whenever those who have greater public means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate.

With a Supreme Court assertively emphasizing free market values seemingly over and above principles of equal representation, Kuhner argues that the only reliable way to circumvent the court’s stance on political finance is to go directly to the source with a constitutional amendment.

Kuhner asserts that the Supreme Court’s mercurial rulings on political finance emerge from the Constitution’s deference to personal ideology in matters of political funding. This constitutional silence has in turn created a vacuum for contradictory judicial interpretations. The most recent iteration of judicial opinion, spearheaded by the Roberts Court, is widely perceived as a threat to the integrity of the American democratic system, leading Kuhner to conclude that “the underlying questions—democracy or plutocracy, capitalism or crony capitalism—are for the people and their representatives to decide, not the Supreme Court.”

A new book features some gruesome but illustrative end matter, not to be overlooked

A long-time advocate for the abolition of capital punishment, Professor Austin Sarat, who teaches Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on the topic of the American death penalty. Rife as it is with knotty moral implications, Sarat sees capital punishment, its modes and its effects, as a unique and telling lens through which American values and beliefs can be distilled—a sort of moribund litmus test for national identity.

Intended to shock, awe, and dispel ambivalence, Sarat’s latest book, Gruesome Spectacles, is a historical exposé of the long-standing tradition of the death penalty in the United States—from Thomas Edison’s push for electrocution, to the nation’s brief and disastrous flirtation with lethal gas.

Progressing chronologically through the ghastly history of American executions, Gruesome Spectacles renders plain the many gory details and ethical fallacies of death by hanging, electrocution, gassing, and—today’s favored mechanism—lethal injection. Built on a scaffold of exhaustive research, Sarat’s book takes into account nearly 300 executions that were botched between 1890 and 2010—each of which has a dedicated endnote in Appendix B—the grisliest appendix you’ve ever seen (forewarning: this material is not for the faint of heart):

9. June 30, 1900. District of Columbia. Benjamin Snell. Hanging. Snell, an especially heavy man, was nearly decapitated by the drop. The extra-wide rope cut through Snell’s windpipe, carotid arteries, and vertebra, leaving his body hanging only on the muscles at the back of his neck.

See?

Sarat describes capital punishment today as a “hidden reality” of America, a stark one-eighty from the spectacles of yore when hangings were conducted before gasping audiences. Bureaucratized and privatized, modern-day executions are open to only a small audience consisting of the convict’s loved ones and those aggrieved by his or her crime, along with the occasional journalist.

Perhaps an even more obscure reality is that modern technology has done little to eradicate gruesome mishaps during executions. Tulsa World reporter, Wayne Greene, was scandalized by the botched lethal injection he witnessed in the early nineties:

206. March 10, 1992. Oklahoma. Lethal Injection. . . Greene wrote that the execution looked “painful and ugly,” and “scary.” “It was overwhelming, stunning, disturbing—an intrusion into a moment so personal that reporters, taught for years that intrusion is their business, had trouble looking each other in the eyes after it was over.”

It seems logical to assume that lethal injection presents a cleaner, quicker method of execution with a lower rate of failure than the blunt instruments of former eras—but when the facts are brought to bear, this assumption quickly crumbles. Writing in the Providence Journal on the occasion of Dennis McGuire’s protracted execution this past January, Sarat noted that the rate of botched executions is 7 percent higher under today’s regime of lethal injection than it has been under previous methods.

Following his discussion of bungled hangings, twice- and thrice-shocked chair-bound convicts and other disconcerting cases, Sarat meditates on the implications of botched executions in his final chapter, “The Struggle to End Capital Punishment.” Here, in the ultimate chapter, he asks the ultimate questions toward which the book’s entire parade of the macabre is tending; how does a mishandled capital sentence get construed in the media—as a “misfortune” or an “injustice”?; and, perhaps most crucially, if there exists no failsafe method of execution free from torturous mishaps, does the death penalty always carry the risk of constituting “cruel and unusual” punishment?

Hot off the press this month, we’ve got books that tackle austerity and national security, our latest Stanford Brief on navigating negotiations, and an exquisite compendium of 19th-century photographs of the American West taken by master photographer, Carleton Watkins.

“[These photos] capture what [Carleton Watkins] and other nineteenth-century photographers and painters repeatedly inscribed as the American sublime. This is the nature that dwarfs and obliterates us." —Richard White, author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

The publication of Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums dovetails with an exhibit of Watkins' highest photographic achievements at The Cantor Arts Center. The exhibit begins April 23 and runs through mid-August. A selection of photographs featured in this book will also travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall.

“Aaron Major's argument is global in scope and draws on a wide range of archival documents to come to a fascinating conclusion: that the main actors in the rise of austerity are central banks, and that neoliberalism in monetary policy actually began not in the 1970s, but in the 1950s and 1960s”

—“Monica Prasad, Northwestern University

“Shirli Kopelman develops a playful action-oriented framework to communicate deep and practical insights about the nature of cooperation and competition in negotiations."

—Jeanne Brett, Northwestern University

"The political economy of national security in the twenty-first century presents a challenging blend of complexity, urgency and austerity. With thirteen case studies and a wealth of critical and constructive analysis, Providing for National Security is essential reading for students, scholars, policy-makers and all who seek to address that challenge."

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